All of Sigurd's Comments + Replies

Sigurd10

Because I used to work for/with companies whose business model was mostly free access covered by ads. Costs of keeping those sites running were substantial and proportional to amount of visitors.

Sigurd10

Perhaps true in lesswrong's case (is it still under active development then?). You'll have to suffer me moving the goalposts again, because what I was getting at was websites that serve fairly static content. If lesswrong is actively developed and has taken a lot of effort to build, then take a random wordpress page instead.

No the aliens don't pay for developer time, for the same reason they don't pay the journalists.

Sigurd40

This assumes users are well informed as to the cost/benefit of seeing ads. Whatever you think about ads, that assumption has proven false I believe. We can dive into how to prove that if you want to contest it. With that assumption gone, however, your position has to be reevaluated.

Sigurd-10

Thanks for the link to your earlier post, it makes your position a little more clear. I think we make different predictions, probably because (A) we are biased and (B) ads and the internet are so entangled by now that it is hard to make a predication like that. Any prediction will need to take into account a multitude of factors.

The line on aliens paying your salary was added because I wanted to preempt the response 'well if ads are no longer the payment model I'd need to find another job'. But you're right to ask that question you did, it is still a weird... (read more)

2ChristianKl
Why do you believe that to be true? For what websites do you believe it to be true? I would expect that any content website that's big enough that hosting fees are the primary issue for raising money can fund hosting fees via Patreon. 
3jefftk
The primary cost of websites like lesswrong is not hosting fees, but developer time. By a huge margin. Are the aliens paying for that too?
Sigurd10

better ads than paywalls

Having worked in advertising for 4 years, I am not convinced. Citation is needed. It also implies these are the only two options, but consider the very webpage you are on currently: no ads, no paywall! What's going on?!

Which is only to say that there are other options to explore. That those two models are the most prevalent does not mean they are the only viable options (think of how easy it is to go with an ad-model if users have been trained to accept it as the status-quo, which is self-enforcing, and how viable some other mode... (read more)

6jefftk
Less wrong is funded by donations. So is Wikipedia. I touch on this in the post, but I think a model where donations fund the operations of most sites, let alone most journalism, is far from practical? I had a crack at answering this from the perspective of what this would do to products a couple years ago: Effect of Advertising. From the perspective of users, I think the internet would be essentially unusable unless you subscribed to a few standard services, which would then have harmful levels of leverage. This is the "You can sort of fix friction with bundling..." paragraph above. I'm not really sure what your hypothetical is supposed to be? For example, if I start a news site and I want to employ journalists, will the magical space aliens give me as much money as I want for their salaries?
Sigurd10

That is correct, which is a crying shame. There's some videos to be found of people who were invited to visit at some point, but yeah there's very little to be found :(

Sigurd30

Hi, there's two things I can recommend.

  • this essay on how to explore a concept/problem from multiple angles, focusing on how neglected visuals are in that process
  • this poster which summarizes his ongoing research in this area. I think its a powerful vision. Google Dynamicland if you want to find more of his recent work
2ChristianKl
That sounds that unless one can visit dynamicland it's currently not possible to be really exposed to his work?
Sigurd10

I am not sure what you are arguing here. First of all, I will completely agree with you that 'innovation' is not an explanation, and so we should be wary of it being used as such. I don't actually think the bucket analogy has much explanatory power (though I find the concept interesting and worthy of further exploration). Using the term 'unavoidable innovation' was my attempt to clarify the analogy in order to be able to point out where in my opinion it fails.

The model in fact attempts to explain why innovation happens, not use innovation as an explanation... (read more)

1[anonymous]
I wasn't trying to argue anything in particular, I'm just using comments as a notebook to keep track of my own thoughts. I'm sorry if it sounded like I was trying to start an argument.
Sigurd50

The narrow/wide bucket analogy is neat; it is a good thinking tool. That said, I am by no means a historian, and do not know how good of a model it actually is. Some scattered thoughts:

  • The metaphorical bucket overflowing means unavoidable innovation, not system collapse per se. It seems to me like the narrow bucket can overflow many times, and each time it does it gets wider. That completely changes the model: no longer does it explain this 'shift towards the north'.

  • As for Rome, it had long exhausted the surrounding lands before it collapsed. Its buc

... (read more)
1[anonymous]
The term "unavoidable innovation" really irks me. It has become this teacher's password for all the world's uncomfortable questions. Why was Malthus wrong? Innovation! How do we prevent civilizational collapse? Innovation! How do we solve competition and conflicts for limited resources? Innovation! How can we raise the standard of living without compromising the environment? Innovation! As if life was fair and nature's challenges were all calibrated to our abilities such that every time we run into population limits, the innovation fairy appears and offers us a way out of the crisis. Where real disaster can only ever result from corruption, greed, power struggles and, y'know, things that generally fit our moral aesthetics about how things ought to go wrong; things that would make a good House of Cards episode.  Certainly not mundane causes like mere exponential population increase. Because that would imply that Malthus was (at least sometimes) right, that life was a ruthless war of all against all, a rapacious hardscrapple frontier. An implication too horrible to ever be true. I'm not arguing that the Malthusian trap explains all the civilizational collapses in history, or even Rome in particular. But it is the default failure mode because exponential growth is fast and unbounded, so to avoid it your civilization has to A) prevent population growth altogether, B) outpace population growth with innovation consistently, or C) collapse from another cause way before population pressure becomes a problem.
2LukeOnline
Thanks!  In regards to the bucket metaphor: the 'width' is the amount of fertile land available to its inhabitants.  Water only starts 'stacking', going 'up', if it can't go 'down' or 'to the sides' anymore. The walls of a bucket prevent sidewards expansion and force the water level to go up.  Like water, pre-industrial humans had good reasons to avoid 'stacking' as well. Population density forces farmers (which is 90%+ of the population in pre-industrial times) to adopt more labor-intensive practices. So when humans had the chance, they preferred to spread out.  When hunter-gatherers cannot find enough food anymore, and all surrounding lands are exhausted by other hunter-gatherers, 'spreading out' ceases to be a viable method. 'HumanWater' has spread as far as it can, and now it will start to 'stack': hunter-gatherers will adopt slash-and-burn agriculture, raising the potential population density. When slash-and-burn agriculture has spread through the entire 'bucket' (all reachable fertile ground), the next agricultural step is implemented. The easiest one: they don't go from slash-and-burn agriculture to plowing, irrigating, weeding and spreading manure in one generation. It happens step by step, starting with the least labor intensive 'upgrade' and only escalating when forced to.  I hadn't really considering overflowing buckets, but for example, the Greek colonisation might be a good example of that happening: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greek_colonisation I love the blog you linked! Funny to see the screengrabs from Game of Thrones, that exact problem bothered me as well :)
Sigurd20

Cheers for the encouragement! I share your intuition, it is what prompted me to post here. A quick sitewide search showed that Bret Victor's name has come up before in discussion on LW, but not as much as I would expect. Anyway I had totally missed Matuschak out of that list, so on the growing list of references he goes :)

4ChristianKl
I have heard of Bret Victor behavior but in addition to watching a talk of him I didn't really found a way to deeper engage with his work. Do you have recommendations about how to best dive into his work?
Sigurd20

Hey eigen, nice of you to say "hallo"

Looking more into manim is on my list, I have been following 3b1b for years ( he had the best explanation of quaternions and partial differential equations by far ). Theres actually a community split-off established recently, which should be more user-friendly. Thanks for reconfirming that as a valuable resource.

And yes, making visualisations is time-consuming. I think the effort put into writing your own tools-for-learning pays off in big ways however. Going through the Lectures without them is also time-intensive. I d... (read more)

2eigen
As a side thought: One of the things I always sensed from this forum is a deep affinity for different ways of understanding things. So, not surprisingly, many converge and are enthralled by Bret Victor, though there are many (Nielsen, Matuschak, the web you linked, 3blue1brown, Jonathan Blow.)  So I think that exploring different mediums can be and end on itself rather than just making visualizations to understand a given subject (I get a sense of that from your comment, and I hope you explore it further!) 
Sigurd20

Lovely, thanks for replying! 

I'd say my understanding of physics is really highschool+ level, so I am actively learning as I go (I studied AI and have some maths background from it but that's about it). I have collected a few references of maths/physics visualisations as a starting point, though most of them touch on programming more than phyiscs per se. What would be a good format for talking about these ideas, i.e. what works best for you?

> however I haven't had time to make them yet
Yes this will probably be an issue for me too, but reaching out here on LW is the first step towards actually committing to it :)

1Adele Lopez
You can just DM me :)
3eigen
Welcome!  I think the problem with visualization content is that is very time-intensive to make (let alone the difficulty.)  You should look at the manim library written in python from which 3blue1brown made his videos of Linear Algebra.
Sigurd200

Hey LessWrong, I found you years ago but made an account only now.  After reading the HPMOR series I bought the Feynman Lectures on Physics, but never made much headway. I am giving it a proper go again though, and feel like I am making more steady progress than the last time I tried.

One thing I am running into time and again is that while Feynman is amazing at guiding the reader through discovering the physical laws on their own, it is still a static textbook. Being a huge fan of everything Bret Victor, I wondered: has anyone attempted to make these ... (read more)

2Adele Lopez
I'm not going through the lectures myself (at least not in a systematic way), but I do spend a lot of time thinking about physics concepts and trying to imagine them in more geometric, conceptual ways. I am interested in making visualizations based on my insights, however I haven't had time to make them yet. I'd love talking about ideas on how to do this though!